


The Past Is Just A Story We Tell Oursleves

by Khaleeki



Series: Batcat Week 2017 [5]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Catwoman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, BatCatWeek, Bittersweet, Buce and Selina are bi, Fluff and Angst, Multi, Romance, Soulmates AU, Time travel kinda, different scenarios
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 13:16:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12705741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khaleeki/pseuds/Khaleeki
Summary: Lives keep changing, tales keep spinning, only to have them spend their entire lives searching for each other in battlefields, hospitals, bars, and come home just before they have to burn it to keep someone else warm.People like them, star-crossed lovers, the ones who get to have a love spanning across time and space – but not each other, never each other – they don’t fall asleep, they don’t stop and they can’t think.It’s not their destiny, it’s not in the cards, it’s not written in the stars. But it is what it is, and it’s worth it.





	The Past Is Just A Story We Tell Oursleves

**Author's Note:**

> So this ended up as a weird Soulmate/Reincarnation AU  
> ( For Prompt Day 7)

Sometimes love isn’t enough, sometimes even though you love someone destiny doesn’t let you be. There are names for people like them, people who never get to end together. Star-crossed lovers, condemned paramours, soulmates without a soul, victims of fate.

They meet at the end of their stories in most of their lives, sometimes they don’t meet at all. They don’t get to see streaks of gray in each other’s hair, don’t get to see their grandchildren laughing and some days, they wonder if it’s even worth it – feeling like the whole universe is against you, feeling like your love keeps on expanding in your chest but you have to keep on moving even if you just want to come home.It feels like the darkness chases them, like it has become part of them. 

Lives keep changing, tales keep spinning, only to have them spend their entire lives searching for each other in battlefields, hospitals, bars, and come home just before they have to burn it to keep someone else warm.

People like them, star-crossed lovers, the ones who get to have a love spanning across time and space – but not each other, never each other – they don’t fall asleep, they don’t stop and they can’t think.

It’s not their destiny, it’s not in the cards, it’s not written in the stars. But it is what it is, and it’s worth it.

***  
In their first life, they are young and the sun was golden in the sky. The heat shining restlessly away at their shoulders as they bask in the river, grateful for droplets of water cooling their skin. The world is young and so are they; Bruce had scraped knees and Selina sun-burnt cheeks.

And she loved him, with feather light touches appropriate for souls as young as theirs. It felt light and soft and careless. But it could never be. Bruce was a prince, the heir of a great Kingdom whereas Selina was just the daughter of a smith. 

After some time his parents forbid him to leave the castle since he had to learn and study, for in the future he would be King of the kingdom. He saw her sometimes, as she carried her skirts in one hand and a basket on the other, a flash of her soft raven hair or her emerald eyes. He would sneak out to the barn and steal sweet kisses sometimes and she smiled and scolded him, telling him that princes and servants didn’t belong together. His parents announced his betrothal on his seventeenth name day and he knew that there wasn’t anything he could do. He walked down the stairs of the armory, his hand on the head of his sword and his head downcast. His feet carrying him towards her.

“You shouldn’t be here Your Grace,” she says coldly as she tied her hair up.

“Really Selina? This is how you wish to treat me?” he says as he walks towards her grabbing her hand.

“You are to be married,” she snaps pulling her hand away from his grasp.

“I know.” His voice is a small whisper.

“Then you know we can never be,” she murmurs.

“I just want you to know that you will forever hold my heart.” 

And she always did.

***  
In the next life, they meet on a street, covered in ash and dust. The ends of Selina’s hair were charred from the fire, her fingertips were dark and her clothes ripped. Bruce looked at her in the middle of the chaos that is a revolution and even though he still hadn’t learned her name, his soul recognizes hers and there is nothing he can do to stop himself from rushing to her.

She was wounded, a deep gash on the skin of her stomach that oozed blood. It trickled down her pants, pools at her ankles as she looked around. He recognized the sigil she wore emblazoned on her coat and thanks the lucky stars that they are not enemies. He thinks that if they were he’d give up his beliefs for her.

“Are you hurt?” he asks.

“Obviously or are you blind?” she snaps and he has to bite back a smile. When he pressed his fingertips to the wound, she flinched but resisted what he thinks must be the urge to break into tears. He carried her back to their base. Instead of weakness, he sees only strength in the way she purses her lips and bites into her cheek as he stitches the ends of her wound together.

“There, that should hold it,” he says looking at his final work. They sit in silence for a while.

“My name is Selina,” she finally offers.

“I know,” he says and then they both smile. It’s a sign, it has got to be – it’s a sign that they are always partners, brothers in arms – through thick and thin their lives will lead them to.

***  
In their third life they don’t meet. She thinks about him though and it’s almost as if she can feel him too. She knows he’s out there but doesn’t know where. She falls in love with a girl with sunsets in her hair and skies in her eyes. They keep it quiet as if they hold the secret of the entire universe. She loves her so much but she knows deep down that her soulmate is out there and that she’ll never be complete without him.  
***  
In her fourth life, she meets him on his deathbed. 

She recognizes him instantly and he smiles when her eyes widen. They always recognize each other, always walk the streets of their lives hoping to meet – even if they hadn’t yet learned of one another’s existence. Their hearts know. Their hearts always know.

“Sergeant Wayne, is that correct?” she asks him, her hands itching to touch him – he knows. His would be doing the same if he could move them. But the bomb blew up too close to him and now blood keeps trickling in his eyes.

But he sees her. God, nothing else matters if he can see her.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“No ma’am-ing me, stop that. I feel like I’m a hundred years old,” she quips, rolling her eyes fondly.

She checks his wounds and notices that one of his legs is missing. He’s lost too much blood. He’s dying and it’s as simple as that.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant Wayne, there’s not much I can do now.”

But she wants to. Oh, she wants to.

“That’s fine. I don’t really have any family to go back to. How about you keep me company until I fall asleep?”

She sits down next to him grabbing his hand. She tells him about all the nice things back home and all the terrible things about war, about how sometimes it feels like death might be better. What are they fighting for if they don’t know how they’ll ever rebuild the world after this?

Bruce keeps his eyes on her at all times and the sight of her makes the pain ebb away. His dying hour is close by but even Death itself seems to linger at the doorway to give them some more time.

“I’ll let you know what death feels like. My plane for that destination is taking off soon enough.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “Send me a postcard, will you?”

With a wheezing, bloody cough, his eyes slide shut and the only thing Selina will ever manage to remember from the war – the only thing she will keep alive in her memory – is his crooked smile as life left him.

The real tragedy is that she didn’t get to know him – that he left her before she could find out everything there was about him. She craves those little things – Does he like coffee or tea? Does he take it with milk or without? Does his laughter sound like the bombs planes overhead drop at them every day? And does his love feel like coming home?  
But she’ll never get to know that and for that, she cries until Pamela pries her away from the bloodied body. She keeps the memory of him alive for as long as she lives.

***  
Selina spends her whole fifth life searching for that one missing piece. She is a veterinarian in a small clinic by the sea. She has a quiet life with her cats and the ocean. She knows where he is, in Los Angeles. She has thought about going to see him but Bruce is an actor, he is famous. There’s no way she was going to get near him. She sees him from far on TV on the cinema. It’s painful that someone can be so close yet so far away. She goes out and dances the night away and wakes up every morning in a different bed. She swims every morning in the ocean and floats on the water hoping that he thinks about her too.  
She sees him adopt a kid and she sees his wedding to a beautiful Arab woman and she sees his baby son and she sees everything form far. She wonders how something can be so far away and yet so close. 

***  
In the sixth life Bruce never found her. He lived a normal life until he realized he was in love with his best friend Clark who was already engaged. He couldn’t take it, his heart couldn’t take any more heartbreaks. He had always been bad at love- he wondered if this is what the universe wanted for him. If he was doomed to live in loneliness. He wanted to find her. He lived his life wandering around the world; he saw so many things, cultures, and people. He learned more than in any other life- he found the beauty of humanity and the beauty of the world. He wanted to show it to her, to tell about all the beautiful things that reminded him of her. He wrote her letters that he knew he was never going to send. He thought about Clark and he hoped he was happy, he thought about Selina and hoped she was happy.  
He thought about himself and hoped that one day he’ll be happy.

***  
In the seventh life, their love starts a riot.

It is forbidden but Bruce wraps his arms around her possessively as he speaks, “I don’t care. We belong together, Selina you know that.”  
And all because of the name on their wrists. They weren’t soulmates. Bruce had a different mark. But the woman who wore the same mark never gave him anything but pain and heartbreak under the façade of gentleness.

No, she wasn’t his soulmate and he knew it. Not truly, not when he met Selina in a coffee shop one day and his soul finally hummed with finding its rightful partner.  
Their love starts a riot and she cries with the anguish of the paradox. Love should never start a riot, love should never be a taboo. What love should be is what she feels in him –belonging and understanding.

After a long day, she always crawls back home to him. His lips are her front door, his eyes the windows to the world and his body a house keeping her safe against a torrent. But they have to fight for their love in this life, fight alongside people like Dick and Barbara, children who believed in false promises of love being light and easy – and who now know better.

In the end, does it matter if they win or lose? They die together, Selina crawling to where he’s lying on the street, every move making her bones erupt in flames. But they die together, holding hands as the downpour washes their souls clean.

She felt the darkness, the dread that in the next life they might not find each other. This stubborn man who loves her more than she will ever know, and whom she loves more than he will ever realize.

They loved each other, and what the hell did anything else matter?

***  
Their lives lose their count – too many of them, time twisting and bending to allow for them to meet, only to rip them apart.

In this life, he is a reckless writer who spends his days wrapped in velvet, his soul dripping with baroque and his heart with romanticism with which he loves passionately. Every morning, he promises to bleed for it because it is worth it.

In this life, Selina has no patience for men like him and makes sure he knows it. Men always want to subdue her, always want to make her into something she is not, and it is only by a slight of fate that she ends up his assistant.

“You’re a fool, Bruce Wayne. You speak of ideals and love, as if you knew anything about them!”

In every life, they find each other she feels more alive. Her mind is the hurricane and his heart the bleeding thing in the middle of the room, screaming in pain and shouting whispers – begging to be felt and admired.

“Miss Kyle, you know what I’m capable of. You know what I’ve done. But I chose to be kind instead of furious at what the world gave me.”

Selina knows how much his writing makes him suffer, knows the sound of his back cracking after a night he spent hunched over his papers. She knows him inside and out, knows that he prefers red to white wine and knows how much he loves his son.

And so she smiles at him and he pours them wine in skulls fashioned into glasses, their life now velvet, satin and decadence but there is something so inherently pure in his soul that Bruce can’t stop looking at this man.

He is a fool but he is a fool whom she wants desperately. Her bones are hollow from not touching him and when he finally pulls her into the plush armchair, his dearest possession – more of a throne than a chair, her soul exhales.

“A fool, am I, Miss Kyle?” he smirks, his hands heavy on tops of her thighs, burning through the cotton which now seems thin compared to the heat eating them alive.  
His eyes darken and her breath hitches when he turns them over, sliding to his knees on the hardwood floor. It feels as if her soul is bared in front of him and really, she wouldn’t have it any other way.

His hands glide over her calves, rucking up her skirts as they make their way to her heat and it’s burning, it’s burning so much that it’s almost a morbid symphony of this decadent writer pressing his lips to the apex of her thighs and mouthing only one thing into her sensitive skin.

He kneels in front of her like a worshipping zealot and she loves him, has loved him all through this life and knows that there was no other way the two of them could have ended up than the way they are now.

***  
In this life, they find each other in biology class. He is sitting at the back of the classroom, next to Barry and Clark. She doesn’t notice him but he does, he stares at her so intensely he thinks it might burn her back. His heart was beating so hard in his chest he was sure the whole class could hear it.

She had a group of friends around her, Pamela Isley and Harleen Quinzel. Pamela’s coppery curls were styled in a perfect bob around her head, her blouse was short showing her midriff and her tight pants made her legs look infinite- every guy’s head turned when she walked in the room. Harleen wore a long white skirt and a pink shirt tucked in, her blonde pigtails wobbled every time she moved. Selina though, she took his breath away. She wore a black dress that hugged her body in all the right places; a small scarf was wrapped around her neck. Her raven hair was short and teased, her lips painted in a crimson red.

He didn’t know how to talk to her- he didn’t know if she would remember him. But she did. When her eyes met him, time itself stopped. She smiled at him and he knew that it was real. That it had always been. 

They sit on the same table for lunch with Clark and Diana; they were pretty popular known for protecting the smaller kids being bullied. Bruce always had a black leather jacket on as if he was Danny Zuko from Grease, no matter how hot it was. Clark was tall and strong being the main quarterback. His hair in a constant pompadour and his arm constantly around his girlfriend Lois. Diana was a track and field teammate and like every single sport ever, she always wore a blue mini-skirt showing off her perfectly tones legs. They became friends and they went to the river and the diner and they pretended like everything was fine.

They listen to music in record players they dance in the soft light of his new lava lamp light to new vinyl discs the Beach Boys and the Beatles and Pink Floyd. They skipped class together and lay on the grass far from town holding hands. They make love on her bed and fuck in his car. They go to the Woodstock Festival together and dance to the music and make out in the rain. 

Everything was prefect until she moved next summer and he never saw her again.

Bruce knew for sure that the world didn’t love them but at least they loved each other.  
***  
In their most precious life, they are Batman and Catwoman.

She hadn’t realized it was him at first. The Dark Knight. The Caped Crusader. It was funny that he was her Bruce, the one she had loved for so long. But he was so broken in this life; he had gone through so much. His heart was worn out, his soul was heavy, his eyes hard. Life hadn’t been easy on her either, causing her to become a criminal to survive.  
They had chased each other in the darkness of the night; they had danced around each other. He chased her across rooftops and through buildings. They had been enemies and friends and lovers all at once.

When she found out it was him she kissed him so hard, he thought he would see stars. She took off his cowl and smiled. “It really is you,” she whispered. It had been a lot of lives ago since they had seen each other.

He pressed his forehead against hers and smiled. They made love right there in that rooftop just in case they wouldn’t get a chance to do it again.

They lie together, the night as their blanket and the stars shining like a diamond. “What if we’re too late in this life but what if we make it in the next? What if we never end and what if we always find each other?”

She sees it in the small hope woven in his smile, the gleam in his eyes when he looks at her.

“You think we’re infinite?”

“You and I,” she whispers, pressing her forehead to his, hot skin to hot skin, “yeah, I’d bet my life on it.”

Their hearts are ripped to shreds throughout their various lives, smashes against glass and shattering like very precious things shatter – softly, quietly, enough to bring the whole world down. Death and life intertwine them, set them on a same path that, although it curves and flattens, always brings them together in the end.

They’ve given their best to the world. 

At the end of the day he always found her and she found him. They will find each other because it is very easy to die for what you believe in. The hardest thing, really, is to live and fight for it.


End file.
